Burhan Wani, the 23-year-old Hizbul Mujahideen militant
cutting his teeth with India’s glamorous social media, achieved what only the
charismatic Sheikh Abdullah had to his credit in Kashmir’s history – a sizeable
swarm of people at his funeral prayers, anything between the army’s drone
figure of 15,000 and some journalists’ 2,00,000. Over a million had joined the
Sheikh’s in 1982 – by far the largest. Many of the 48 youths killed in the
clashes triggered by the July 8 encounter died on the day of the funeral.

Funerals of even the iconic militants and separatists have
been invariably ignored as their charm faded out the same day. Some pulled a
thousand, someone even five or ten thousand. In 20 years, Kashmir has witnessed
two massive funerals: around 20,000 attended Mustafa Khan’s during Farooq
Abdullah’s regime in Tangmarg and around 30,000 Badshah Khan’s in Kulgam when
Mufti Sayeed was chief minister.

It didn’t take Kashmiris long to forget even top separatist leaders
Abdul Gani Lone and Sheikh Abdul Aziz – one shot dead by gunmen in Srinagar in
2002 and another killed in security forces’ firing in Baramulla in 2008.
Masarat Alam, unparalleled protagonist of the 2010 street turbulence faded into
oblivion within days of his arrest. More significantly, nobody died for high
profile separatist Afzal Guru whose execution in 2013 was “murder of an
innocent” for the average Kashmiri.

So what made Burhan a legend whose death triggered a chain
of clashes and left around 50 people dead, hundreds injured and a bustling
tourist season that has already suffered losses of hundreds of crores of rupees
punctured?

After the Sheikh’s dismissal in 1953 and his successor
Farooq Abdullah’s in 1984, no J&K politician has embarrassed New Delhi
beyond a point. Mufti alone, who cultivated Congress and floated his own PDP to
neutralise Sheikh’s National Conference (NC), took liberties. His detractors
insist he had Delhi’s “licence” that eventually made him the only Muslim home
minister.

His brief tenure as Union home minister witnessed a fringe
insurgency explode with the release of JKLF militants in exchange for his
kidnapped daughter Rubaiya in 1989, followed by Kashmiri Pandits’ mass
migration in 1990. His outcry over the Ghulam Nabi Azad government’s allotment
of land to a Hindu shrine board divided people irretrievably on regional and
communal lines in 2008, when secessionism had ebbed and the Valley was blooming
with tranquillity.

With a mission to demolish Abdullah’s NC, Mufti and daughter
Mehbooba left no stone unturned to discredit and demonise ‘India’ – its body
politic, democracy, systems and institutions. With both UPA’s and NDA’s
unfettered permission, he laid the ‘road to Rawalpindi’. It won him a chunk of
votes and helped him become chief minister twice, but at a price Delhi will
have to pay for ages.

For over a decade Mufti and his party only whetted the sense
of victimhood and betrayal in the Valley which, in the process, grew rabidly
anti-Indian – some of them ferociously Islamist. Omar Abdullah’s deficits of
domicile, language and culture forced him to toe Mufti’s line and both, in
competition, began discrediting “Indians”.

At the end of the day, nobody in Kashmir respects or loves
India. Anybody perceived to be soft on India runs huge risks, such as those
meted out to the residents of Kokernag after the July 8 encounter. Their houses
were torched and orchards destroyed. The government remained a mute spectator.

The irony is that Kashmir was pushed back to the abyss when
complaints of rape, custodial killings and fake encounters against the security
forces had dipped to the lowest level of 25 years and India’s best held
assembly elections had happened in J&K in 2014. Nobody knew Burhan who was
then three years into militancy.

But Mufti didn’t wait much to ride the tiger. He freed
Masarat and permitted him to hold a massive pro-Pakistan demonstration in front
of J&K police headquarters. It woke up all the lions in hibernation. Within
days a young school dropout emerged as an icon of jihad for Kashmir’s
Generation Next.

Meanwhile, Mufti’s ally continued to stoke fires. A frenzied
group of cow vigilantes killed a Kashmiri Muslim trucker in Udhampur. BJP
leaders and friends filed petitions to terminate the state’s flag and special
position. The tinderbox needed just a matchstick that came in handy with
Burhan’s death.

END

[Published
on editorial page of all editions of today’s TIMES OF INDIA]